The variety of English described in this work is informal educated spoken Southern British. The work is based on a study of recorded texts together with an examination of my own usage as a native speaker. In articulatory features the speakers represented in the recorded texts varied within narrow limits, from "received pronunciation" in the strict sense, with no observable regional characteristics, to a form recognizably southern but still clearly acceptable as "standard British": roughly the range specified in the principal works of Daniel Jones and used as the basis for the teaching of English as a foreign language in areas where British English is taken as the model.
This study of native and non-native utterance was based on the theory that the impression of rhythm in spoken English is produced by the serial recurrence of more or less isochronous intervals marked off by stressed syllables and that the periodic movement associated with the rhythmic impulse is produced by the respiratory muscles. Thus a major part of the experimental work was concerned with stress which, in a stress-timed language such as English, is fundamental to the phenomenon of speech rhythm, since it is the feature by which the temporal units are marked.
If cultured people are expected to have read all the significant works of literature, and thousands more are published every year, what are we supposed to do in those inevitable social situations where we're forced to talk about books we haven’t read? In this delightfully witty, provocative book, a huge hit in France that has drawn attention from critics and readers around the world, literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard argues that not having read a book need not be an impediment to having an interesting conversation about it.
This book examines how urban adolescents attending a non-mainstream learning centre in the UK use language and other semiotic practices to enact identities in their day-to-day lives. Combining variationist sociolinguistics and ethnographically-informed interactional sociolinguistics, this detailed and highly reflexive account provides rich descriptions and discussions of the linguistic processes at work in a previously underexplored research environment.
The last fifty years have seen a significant change in the focus of saga studies, from a preoccupation with origins and development to a renewed interest in other topics, such as the nature of the sagas and their value as sources to medieval ideologies and mentalities. The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Sagas presents a detailed interdisciplinary examination of saga scholarship over the last fifty years, sometimes juxtaposing it with earlier views and examining the sagas both as works of art and as source materials. This volume will be of interest to Old Norse and medieval Scandinavian scholars and accessible to medievalists in general.
